Governments’ banning the private practice of doctors has a history of 50 years, exactly as old as the abandonment of health and welfare of people by them. Wherever there are uneducated politicians and jealous bureaucrats, they share this common animosity and jealousy towards doctors. Bureaucrats retire at an age and politicians stop when party men stop following them. This hatred and jealousy stems from the right of doctors to practice medicine till the end of their days.

We can understand a doctor punished for not looking patients but how can we not understand the madness in punishing him for looking patients? That is what is going on in the world. Doctors who look patients in homes in their spare time are raided, suspended and dismissed by politicians and bureaucrats, on the hope that there won’t be anyone left to look patients in government hospitals and all will go to costly private hospitals run by their sons and daughters and sons-in-law. When this madness continues in the largest democracy in the world and millions of people who have no other place than free government hospitals to go are left uncared for and dying, world’s nations’ conscience is not turned to responding to this injustice. India spends millions on educating and training doctors, so that so many of them doctors would be available there day and night to treat people. People here means, not people’s representatives and state ministers who get round-the-clock free medical treatment but people who cast their votes, elect them and make the revenue for paying them salaries. When people go to a nearby doctor’s residence, they are told that they cannot be treated at doctors’ homes but have to go overcrowd the hospitals and contented with what unsatisfactory treatment they get there because politicians have dictated so. Government wants doctors to stop looking patients in their homes and they know that their hospitals cannot treat all patients, meaning politicians in government want to drive patients from government hospitals to private hospitals owned by them, their relatives, friends, favorites or followers, a large portion of the earnings from where would ultimately reach them in times of elections and in times of need. State health ministers regularly declare that they are banning private practice and that strict action would be taken against those who violate. Every time they open their mouths to declare these things, there is an invariable question asked them by press: why are so many doctors’ posts lying vacant in your state? The answer will always be ‘they will soon be filled up’, not ‘they already have been filled up’. The fact is, they will never get doctors to fill up these vacancies, due to their arrogant and unilateral decisions to raid doctors’ homes for detecting private practice. For years they are being asked this same question and for years they are continuing to give this same answer; and the posts are continuing to lie vacant for decades. That much is the care and attention they give to health care in their states. These vacancies have never been filled up nor would they ever will be, unless private practice is allowed for government doctors. Government hospitals will gradually become never-to-visit-places for patients, which exactly is what the politicians and bureaucrats want.

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